It's commonly known that towels are used to wipe away and absorb sweat, bodily fluids, and water while working out, running, and performing other strenuous activities. The towel/absorptive material is effective in absorbing these bodily fluids for multiple reasons. These reasons for removing sweat can range from comfort to the person sweating to functionally removing sweat for grip or for visibility purposes.
Towels are used for all different sports, gym activities, and running/cross fit work outs. Some sports that use towels are basketball, football, baseball, soccer and on and on. The majority of these sports and many more would benefit the use of a towel to be available at all times and not only available during certain breaks or time outs during the course of play. In some sports like football, quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, and certain specialty lineman wear towels during the active course of the game. This serves as a disadvantage because these towels are usually worn hanging from the waistline from a belt or tucked into the pants. This can be slightly cumbersome, restricting, and plain annoying and interfering with sports play. In this instance the use of a hands free towel would be a major benefit and advantage to the game. In basketball you find this same problem. Players need the towel during play but have to wait until breaks and time outs to “towel off”. This poses a problem for grip on the ball and visibility along as poses a hazard to the players as when their sweat flops onto the court it creates a slippery and dangerous condition.
Towels are also used during work outs in all different settings such as in the gym, outdoors, and indoors at home. Many times working out in a gym setting a towel is used in addition to wiping sweat to lay on workout equipment such as benches and stools to keep the users sweat from getting on the equipment and to also keep the user from contacting the equipment which may be dirty from a previous persons use along with just laying the towel some place while performing work out moves and activities. This poses a problem because the towel is now tainted and dirt from the equipment and in turn transfers the dirt and germs to the towels' user. Seeing how the towel is primarily used to wipe the users face, this poses a significant threat of getting germs and dirt directly into key germ spreading areas such as the mouth, eyes, nose, and ears, along with directly into the overly open pores of the skin due to perspiration and heat release.
Another common problem with gym work outs and towel use is the unavoidable touching of work out equipment and handle grips such as dumb bells, bar bells, pulley grips, machine grips (weights and cardio, e.g., elliptical machine, treadmills, stationary bikes, and climbers), etc., with the user's hands and then touching the towel with the dirty sweaty hands that were just in contact with the dirty work out equipment/grips. The towel is now tainted and dirty from the users' hands. Again the towel now transfers the dirt and germs from the equipment to the user's face and body being “toweled off”. The use of work out gloves may prevent the users' hands from getting directly dirty or infected by pathogens that cause warts and other skin contact diseases, but do not prevent those same germs and dirt from being transferred from the surface of the gloves to the towel just as they would from the hand.
Lastly there are some situations where a towel is just not accessible, feasible, or just plain inconvenient to use while working out. Running outdoors poses an inaccessible setting as many people do not carry a towel with themselves while running. Even if a backpack is used the runner would have to inconveniently stop to open the backpack take the towel out, wipe off the sweat, then place the towel back in the bag and continue on. Even worse is the runner doing that same scenario while trying to maintain the running pace. That would be difficult and dangerous. This would be the same as if a runner would try to stuff a towel in their waistband and just as improbable for a runner to hold a towel in their hand throughout the duration of their entire run. This similar problem can be found in the gym on a treadmill or other piece of cardio equipment (e.g., elliptical, stationary bike, and climber, etc.). The runner doesn't have the means to hold or carry a towel while performing their work out. It may be argued that the runner can just place the towel on the treadmill/equipments arm supports or control board but then they also pose the same problem with tainting the towel with dirt and germs as previously stated. It also is awkward and possibly dangerous for the runner to constantly look away from what they are doing, to locate, reach out, and grab the towel off the equipment to towel off. This could cause the runner to misstep, stumble, trip, and ultimately fall.
Other situations where a towel is beneficial can be for persons gardening and cooking. Many times these people cannot grab and use a towel because their hands are soiled with cooking material, or contaminated raw ingredients, or are full of dirt or wearing dirty gloves and can't grab a towel. Likewise, the towel will first contact the soiled hands before the other body parts, e.g., forehead, which are less soiled but perhaps have perspiration.